Everyone pointing out that it’s suspicious how many AI tools are free, it’s because building a tech company these days 100% revolves around giving people your product for free/at an extreme discount until they forget how to function without it, then closing the jaws of the trap The easiest example of this is Uber operating on massive losses for a decade so they could offer their service at an unbelievably cheap rate long enough to train people not to call cabs anymore. A lot of young people coming up now don’t even know “calling a cab” is a thing

This is a hard thing to explain or quantify, but a lot of these Disney movies that come out and then kind of blink out of existence are full of characters that look like no one fell in love with them while they were making the movie. Like, you think of your absolute favourite animated movie and it was probably full of characters that felt like they were someone’s favourite thing to wake up and play with. Like someone went to work and said “I’m gonna make everyone love this fucker as much as I do”

Celebrate Pokémon Day by reading my comic about Giovanni and Lt. Surge getting handsy with each other on Patreon patreon.com/coelasquid?utm… I’ll probably figure out another way to share it when it’s all done, but for now you can read the pages as I finish them by throwing any amount of money at all in the top jar.

THIS SHIIIIT THIS SHIT RIGHT HERRRRRE. There is nothing I hate more in media than stories that tell you exactly how you’re supposed to feel about them with no room for ambiguity or interpretation.

https://twitter.com/jpbrammer/status/1620422784836046851

Here is a story about making things to be consumed by a large audience from the perspective of someone who used to make a webcomic with such a vast readership that I got booted from my first webhost because every time I updated, the deluge of traffic crashed their entire company;

The number of times I’ve seen Terminally LA people bring their dogs into places that serve food and do absolutely nothing about the dog jumping up to put it’s paws on surfaces the food is served on because they think it’s very cute and a gift to everyone who got to witness it

https://twitter.com/madison_tayt/status/1619777975251251200

Watched the most LA Woman you can imagine just let her dog stand up and sniff and lick all over the counter at a coffee shop while squealing with delight about how cute it was.

Listen if you’re taking long enough breaks between sets you can pull your book out you gotta gtfo the machine and give other people their turn

https://twitter.com/pradasiren/status/1617547786043392000

I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt and assume she’s gonna clean the bare foot sweat off the machine but don’t hog the equipment while you sit around for 20 minutes reading books or fucking around on your phone or whatever.

You know I actually may have been 23 when I drew that thing about how to draw more varied bodytypes in your gay bodybuilder porn that the internet chopped up to use as workout advice and have been quoting and fighting about ever since

https://twitter.com/western_trad/status/1613652392909897730

Somewhere between 21-23, at least. I see this shit get quoted in like… tv shows and things made in completely different languages now. It was never trying to teach you how to work out, it was about a bunch of different sliders to consider for horny jacked man drawings.

I’ve never watched a movie that made me want to get up and leave the theatre more than Skinamarink but I think that’s what they were going for so in that sense it was a resounding success. Profoundly unpleasant to watch and the most effective horror movie I’ve seen in years. I haven’t experienced the same feeling of “ohthankgod” that a movie was over since Uncut Gems.

M3gan was such great love letter to all of the best robots in fiction. Normally if someone said they were going to put Robocop, the Terminator, Hal, AM, GLaDOS, Samantha, the work of Asimov, and the Child’s Play franchise into a blender the result would be the wankiest garbage, but they had enough of a point of view to make it work

Thinking about the completely fake bomb/drug/criminal detection device that was sold for up to $8000 per unit to police and militaries the world over and was quite literally a useless piece of plastic full of strangely deliberately placed dead ants Every time Theranos comes up all I can think about is how they can never hold a candle to the $8000 box of dead ants that was supposed to be able to find people in Polaroid photos 500 miles away.

This is a really fascinating video.

https://twitter.com/WrittenByHanna/status/1587338245523775489

Reminds me of the time I was at the Forks in Winnipeg and this 10 year old kid kept saying “I COULD DO THAT” at all the art, much to his mother’s exasperation. At some point I leaned over to say “you should, then! You could sell it here!” and he got very embarrassed.

I think CONSTANTLY about cult classic media that “failed” by the box office measure but was foundational in the modern media landscape and how every year it gets harder make that. Highlander was a mid-budget box office flop that inspired like half of nerd media these days NO ONE wants to give a shot to anything as risky and esoteric as Highlander, but they’re chomping at the bit to make “literally Highlander, again” because Highlander was allowed to be a weird flop that spent 35 years finding its audience

When people talk about “what’s alienating conservatives” about comics/games/movies/whatever I remember a conversation I had with a self-proclaimed conservative who said that if Gargoyles was made today (like not a reboot, exactly as it was in the 90’s) Elisa would be too “woke” He was trying to make the point that he liked this character in his childhood and enjoyed how she was written, but if the exact same character was written in the exact same way now it would just be “furthering agendas” and it would make the show bad, even if it was the same show.

Confessing that I don’t remember who Lahabrea is because I can’t tell any of the Shutter Shades Wizards apart Emet was the only good ascian, sorry ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Baz Lurhmann Elvis is revisionist history lionizing Elvis and yadda yadda yadda, but you know what it does extremely well that no factual biopic could is capture the energy of what it was like to be excited about Elvis in the 1960’s It was a movie about why people loved Elvis.

I had this moment like “I wonder what those Professional Eccentrics from that SciFi show Mad Mad House are up to these days” and found out apparently the vampire guy is a bodybuilder now You love to see it

Reminder that Disney is also fucking over independent cinema by threatening to revoke the right to play their movies from theatres that won’t break contracts with other distributors to play Disney movies exactly where, when, and how often they say

https://twitter.com/BrndnStrssng/status/1522241999096668160

This is actually a much bigger deal than it might seem at first glance, because for a movie to qualify for an Oscar it needs to run in a cinema in Los Angeles during the period of eligibility. This is how streaming services qualify their movies for awards

King of the Hill has such great naturalistic acting and I wonder how much of it has to do with squeaking in and setting acting precedents before Family Guy came out and everyone just kinda got trained to solve every problem with pizza hands My portfolio advice is that if you can showcase acting more unique than characters just cycling through variations of these poses while they talk you’re already putting yourself ahead of the pack

This is something I’m kind of heartbroken and at my wit’s end about so I figure there’s no harm doing a last chance bid to twitter to signal boost for help; is there any chance at all that anyone around LA has come across this huge leatherbound sketchbook? The last time I remember definitively holding it in my hands and drawing in it was the The Wolves bar in Downtown LA, then I went to the Pershing square metro and took the red line up to North Hollywood to watch movies with some friends

Funkos took a page from Diamond’s extremely predatory distribution tactics and used it to create a ton of forced scarcity and plastic waste to put the American vinyl toy market in a stranglehold and choke companies trying to make more interesting art figures to death.

https://twitter.com/ibmm335/status/1515612686360457220

Years ago someone did a great rundown of the way Funko uses Diamond’s “chase copies” tactic to force retailers to buy hundreds of common figures if they want to stock rare ones, which is why any store that gets into pop figures suddenly becomes completely overrun with funko bloat

I remember talking to Americans who were very offended that we didn’t read X Y Z Great American Novel in my Canadian high school English classes and I was just like “what Canadian novels did you read in high school? April Raintree? Wild Geese? Stone Angel? Barometer Rising?” Lemme tell you In Search of April Raintree is a better book than Great Gatsby or Catcher in the Rye